You're forgetting the $7500 federal income tax credit for a Leaf purchase, so the net MSRP is really $21,300, as stated on the Nissan website.

No brainer at these prices. If you've got a garage and can plug in overnight, electric makes at least a great 2nd car for all your in-city and nearby driving.

And yet the cost models for pay-to-charge public charging stations are ridiculously, ludicrously high. Blink and ChargePoint dick you $2/hour which gets you about ten miles of range.

$2 for ten miles, vs $3.50 for a gallon, which yields 25 to 40 miles of range.

That's why you rarely see any EV's at pay-to-charge stations. It's stupid expensive.

ChargePoint is often $2 per session, which lets you fill up completely if you like, up to 73 miles on my Leaf.

The Blinks I've used are typically $1 per hour.

Many stations around town (including the DC fast chargers on I-5) are free.

Yes, public charging can be the slightly more expensive route. Most EV drivers charge primarily at home (10.71 cents / kWH at City Light residential rates) and only use the public stations in a pinch.

Nissan is leasing Leafs for under $200/month. Sure, you could buy a new Kia for half that but as Goldy and @1 point out if you don't drive a lot, a Leaf could be a good solution.

Factor in the reduced maintenance: zero oil changes, zero timing belt replacements too.

And the State is creating charging corridors along I-5 and Highway 2.

@3 ChargePoint is per-session? Thanks, I didn't know that.

We've reduced our household gasoline use by about 90% with one all-electric Leaf and one gas-electric hybrid Chevy Volt, both now made in the U.S. of A.

My partner has a significant commute. On Seattle-Auburn days, he can use the Leaf for the 64 mile round trip. He plugs in at a wall plug (for free, for the moment) during the day for a bit of a range safety margin, but he could probably go without charging during the day. On other days, he has do Seattle-Tacoma-Auburn (also sometimes Puyallup), so the Volt is the car for that mission. It can do 38-40 miles on electric before the gas motor kicks in. Even with all that driving, his Volt miles are over 80% electric.

These cars make gas a back-up plan, not a way of life.

Everyone should do this now. The planet cannot take any more of our carbon pollution. We will suffer as a species and doom many other species to extinction. And the fact that it now easily pencils out means there's really no excuse to keep burning gasoline.

As the technology gets better, I expect all-electric vehicles to be able to do all these missions easily. The Tesla Model S can already do it (if you've got $100k to drop on a car). Others will follow and for a lot cheaper.

What's better yet is that because so much of WA's electricity comes from hydroelectric, you can really reduce your carbon emissions by getting away from fossil fuel vehicles.

WA should really be pushing for a national tax-and-dividend carbon policy because most of us would start getting checks in the mail.

You really have to factor in battery life. I don't mean battery life in terms of how far you can drive on a charged battery, I mean battery life in terms of how long the battery will hold up in service and still take a mostly-full charge.

If you've lost 50% of battery capacity in two or two and a half or even three years, that's a massive expense. The battery packs for EVs are not cheap.

If there's a lease option that includes battery replacement, or that expires before the batteries do, you should look at that. One thing you should not do is to think in terms of an EV having the service life of an internal-combustion engine. While the electric propulsion system might well last forever, the batteries don't.

Meanwhile, I would dearly love to have a lightweight electric flivver with a 1KW photovoltaic array on its roof to use around town for running occasional errands. Park it in the sun for a couple hours and it charges its golf-cart batteries enough for a local round trip or two at speeds up to 30 mph. This doesn't seem like a market segment that will ever exist, though.

@8 That is very yrue, and there is not much real-world data yet on total battery service life.

Anecdotally, Prius owners have been getting 100,000 miles to 200,000 miles out of their batteries, and replacement costs are nowhere near the figures tossed about ten years ago when that was a new technology.

Here's hoping the markets keep innovating- a sub $40,000 EV with the range of a Tesla and guaranteed 100,000 mile life (or better)
would be fantastic

Battery longevity is certainly an issue. Nissan projects that the Leaf batteries will lose 20% of their charge capacity in 7 years, at which point they recommend replacement. Batteries may then get a 2nd life in home energy storage systems. And yes, replacement will be a major expense. Perhaps $7000. Nissan has seen some battery degradation issues in extremely hot climates, like Phoenix, but the northwest should prove relatively gentle.

I'm on a 2-year lease, myself, to see how the technology shakes out before committing to a purchase. That issue makes Nissan's lease deals even more attractive.

I tend to agree with this guy:
http://eriksoderstrom.com/2010/09/14/nis…

Hydro power is good for climate change, but it is far from no-impact. So if you want to buy a Leaf to take advantage of that fact, go ahead I guess. The setup you describe where you have two cars (one conventional, one Leaf as an in-town backup) is, in my opinion, not a model for sustainability. It should be more like one car that gets used rarely (~3,000 miles / year) for heavy loads and day trips and then walk/bike/bus for most of your in-town needs. Whether a car is electric vs conventional matters way less than how many miles you drive each year, and that means setting up your life in an intelligent way that not many miles are needed.

The problem with saying "That's X fewer gallons of gas I would have used" is what determines the whole "would have used" value in the first place? Commuting to downtown Seattle from Everett is stupid to begin with -- but then somebody might switch to a Prius or something and say Look!, I'm saving X gallons of gas now. You could easily have moved from Mt Vernon to Everett and called *that* an improvement. Both versions are stupid and unsustainable.

What kind of environmental degradation is caused by the production of the batteries?

@11 -- Most American households have 2+ cars. If you want to make progress reducing emissions, you have to start where the people are. Your opinion of their work/life choices is irrelevant.

And my 90% reduction statement is based on actual use history. My household did and still does about 20,000 mi per year. We're just doing 90% of it on hydro, now.

@14 The core question is how much energy does it take to power your life? You changed the source of your power but the total energy required to power your life has remained the same.

Here's some reading:

http://www.withouthotair.com/c2/page_27.…

That whole book is worth reading.

Yes, the typical household has 2+ cars. Switching one of them to a Leaf is NOT meeting them where they are since they can't afford it. Ditching a car and moving closer to work is a practical solution for many. Going from 2 conventional cars to 2 cars that are gas and electric won't come close to bringing us towards the carbon emission cuts needed to curb climate change.

You have to answer the question: How many kilowatt-hours does it take to power your life? This 64-mile round trip commute is insane and unsustainable regardless of whether it's done via hybrid. A person who commutes 2 miles each way in a Chevy Taho uses orders of magnitude less energy. (Not that I advocate that either -- just walk or bike if it's 2 miles).

What @4 said.

However, you'd be better off buying a low priced 60 mpg car, which will be selling next model year, since most of the carbon impact for a city dweller is THE MANUFACTURE OF THE CAR ITSELF.

@15 -- Are you saying they can afford an extra $2000 / month on the mortgage to live in Seattle, but they can't afford a $200 / month Leaf lease?

The tradeoff between house prices / commute costs turns out to be about even when you add it all up (depending on location, of course). Seattle prices are on their way back up, so the $200 lease on a Leaf may indeed make financial sense due to the incredible subsidies -- just don't pretend you're doing the environment any favors. Again, it's all about "X kW-hours less than I would have used". Well, where that initial amount is totally arbitrary so reducing it a little shouldn't be considered 'green'. Is your carbon footprint such that the earth can sustain it or isn't it?

It's a good point though. The lack of affordable housing and good schools near work centers is a huge problem for climate change. It goes to show how interlinked these issues are.

The main thing to think about is:

1. Do I drive 200 miles or less round trip every day, but more than 20 miles round trip? If so, an electric car is a good option, PROVIDED you use it. Electricity here is a lot cheaper than gas, and by the time you need a new battery (10 years) the cost of batteries should have dropped substantially.

2. Do I commute more than an hour each way a day? - buy a high mpg car - if most of that is on a congested highway, buy a hybrid.

3. Do I mostly use the bus, bike, or walk, and use the car for groceries and evenings to drive small distances? Just wait until the 60 mpg cars come out and get one.

The main carbon impact for someone who lives and works in a city is the physical construction of the car - you just don't use it enough. If you do buy an electric car - USE IT AS YOUR PRIMARY CAR and only drive the gasoline or diesel car when you have to go a long distance or have two different destinations that are not in the same direction.

@19 it depends on your goal. Is it to reduce your carbon footprint in order to be sustainable or is it to minimize spending given a fixed lifestyle?

If it's the latter, your formula makes sense. If it's the former and you drive anywhere near 200 miles a day you're gonna have to change that. No Prius or Leaf will make a 100-mile commute sustainable.

Good luck getting stuck on I5 with your Ev.

And if it costs so little, we might as well set up a bunch of these electric driven H2 refueling stations like Denmark is doing:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/denmar…

@20 this is why suburbs are dying out.

@21 ever watch the electric test drive on Top Gear - it was fun!

I thought a lot had changed since the manufactured "energy crisis" of 10 years ago, but it looks like the legacy of Sen. Magnuson lives on.

Hey Will in Seattle do your have a reference for "The main carbon impact for someone who lives and works in a city is the physical construction of the car - you just don't use it enough."

Here's a couple of papers that looked at Life Cycle Analysis and found physical construction of the EV and battery is a very small part of the CO2e profile

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es9…
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es03…
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es70…
http://www.environment.ucla.edu/media_IO…

@19 Hey Will in Seattle do your have a reference or study for "The main carbon impact for someone who lives and works in a city is the physical construction of the car - you just don't use it enough."

I am definitely getting a kick out of my 2013 Zero motorcycle - way cheaper than a car, almost no maintenance, trivial operating cost. I've been adding luggage to increase my grocery run capacity, but otherwise it's like a very zippy appliance. ;)

@26- I was looking at one of those as well. The cost is about the same as a very small conventional car, so the math hasn't worked just yet...but I assume costs will come down in a year or 2. Are you finding the 75-80 mile range estimates accurate? I can see a lot of use for weekly 60-70 mile trips and have some range anxiety.

@24, 25 I see you've met Useless Will. He is a parody account, and provides nothing but cringingly embarrassing comedy.

There are all kinds of problems with how this city and this state treats EVs, starting with the $100 annual road use fee intended to compensate for the lack of gas taxes on the electricity.

That works for people who drive more than about 5,500 miles a year, but if you drive less than that it starts to eat up any savings pretty fast. I have an EV as a second car. Got it really cheap last fall (long story) to replace an old Volvo to drive around town. I expected to drive it about 3,000 miles a year, and I'm so close to that target that I am wondering if I'm some kind of clairvoyant.

At that level of use, I'm paying 3.3 cents a mile. The same sized gas car would cost me 1.9 cents a mile in tax. I can afford it so I can't say I care all that much, but it's kind of fucked up that the "greens" who run the show here would want to charge an EV owner MORE.

Then there's City Light's rates. In a whole lot of other states, there are special EV rates if you charge overnight, which is what most of us do. Christ, in fuckin' Georgia the EV overnight rate is a penny a minute. Here in "green" Seattle, the rate is 10.71 cents a minute. No break, even though the utility literally throws away electricity at night because there aren't enough users for the output of plants that must be kept running 24 hours for operational reasons. So they keep turbines running but without connecting them to anything.

I don't have any problem whatsoever paying a road use tax. But my EV gets the equivalent of 100 miles a gallon, which means a fair tax based on the 55-cent a gallon gas tax would be a bit more than half a penny a mile. But what does "green" Washington State charge me? 3.3 cents a mile, or six times the rate I'd pay if I had a gas car that got 100 miles to the gallon.

Again, in absolute dollars this is trivial. And the state needs the money, so if they ding me for $100 a year instead of $15 a year in tax, I'll live. I can also absorb the full cost of Seattle City Light's electricity, even after they raise their rates another 25%. But what kind of sense does this make?

I noticed people talking about the cost of batteries. This has to be adjusted for the lack of oil changes and the lack of maintenance of transmissions and exhaust systems. If you do that, the cost of a replacement lithium-ion battery for a Nissan LEAF will run about 4 cents a mile over the battery's expected 10-year, 100,000-mile lifetime.

But I go back to that "best deal" calculation from the feds, which ignores the state's road use tax. I haven't done the numbers, but it's a significant bite. If this "green" city wanted to get serious about climate change, it would tell City Light to have a special tariff for overnight EV charging, and would shitcan those meaningless street cars and solar panel subsidies and use the money to make EVs a no-brainer purchase or lease.

Seattle gets just about all of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, plus a sliver from windmills. The most effective thing the worthies around here could do to reduce the "carbon footprint" would be to get as many people into EVs as soon as possible.

When I said I haven't done the numbers in my previous message, I meant that I haven't adjusted the federal numbers about the savings on a "gallon" of "e-gas." I don't do my calculations in those terms. Maybe I will give it a try in a subsequent posting.

#9, it's true that Prius batteries have lasted longer than people thought they would. But those aren't lithium-ion batteries. They are nickel metal hydride. The fact that they're lasting longer than expected doesn't mean that lithium-ion batteries will last longer than expected.

One last point for now. #8, forget about charging your EV from rooftop solar panels. A 240-volt level 2 charger (basically an electric dryer circuit) will feed 3 kWh an hour into an EV battery, which will be enough for 6 miles in the winter and maybe 10 miles in summer.

Solar panels on the roof of a car don't generate even close to that amount of electricity. And forget about a 1 kWh battery. That will get you a couple miles in the winter and maybe three miles or so in the summer. And it'll take forever to generate that much from solar panels on the roof of your car.

The Leaf is not the only all electric car sold here. Mitsubishi has been selling the MiEV since Dec. 2012. It is considerably cheaper than the Leaf, gets about 80 miles per charge, and also qualified for the tax credit and no sales tax.

Noicons dear, you have a few things wrong in your assessment.

1.) Georgia Power's 1.3 cent rate is before all the miscellaneous per kwh charges they have (there's about five of them -environmental compliance, demand side management, nuclear construction, fuel cost recovery, municipal tariff - that sort of thing) the real EV rate is about six cents, and you only get that rate if you agree to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty cents per kwh (before the above listed miscellaneous charges) during summer afternoon peak hours. Plus, their monthly charge is about double City Light's.

2.) City Light is a hydroelectric utility. It does not have plants that have to "run all night". Nor does it have the air conditioning load that is forcing southern utilities to incentivize overnight charging. It does have to maintain a base load, of course, but most excess overnight generation gets sold on the spot market.

3.) The City Light rate you cite is the upper tier residential rate. The lower rate is 4.66 cents (which is actually a tad lower than it used to be). You get the first 600 kwh per 60 day billing period at the low rate from April-October, and you get 960 kwh at the low rate per 60 day billing cycle the rest of the year. If you wanted to maximize your low tier rate, you could probably have a second meter installed for your charging station. You would need to have it approved by DPD, and there are additional costs associated with that, but you could do it.

4.) The solar incentive is a state program that utilities administer and are required to offer.

Well, hon, let me answer you.

1. Even after all the adjustments, Georgia's EV rate is much lower than what I pay to charge mine.

2. How much base load is maintained overnight and not used? Even you've acknowledged that this happens, so some numbers would help. A typical EV takes 15 to 20 kWh for a recharge, so you'd need to have a lot of them charging at 1 in the morning to have any impact. You'd think that, at the very least, City Light could charge EV owners at the same rate they get on the spot market overnight. I doubt they're getting 10.71 cents per kWh.

3. Like most homeowners, my usage was already in the 10.71 cent bracket before I got the car. Rather than apply my average rate, which is about 8.5 cents, I prefer to be honest about what it actually costs to charge it, which would be the increment for an additional appliance. I went back and checked, and my car uses about 190 kWh in a 60-day period. If you do the math, there's no way I could ever pay less than the top rate to hook it up, given that I have lights, a water heater, and all the other electrical gear you find in houses.

To get a second meter, you're telling me that I'd need to get a special order from a different city department. Presumably, I'd pay a monthly charge for that meter plus an installation fee. How much? And is it even possible in the real world? Seems to me that if the city wanted to make this happen, the city could do it without requiring all that hoop-jumping.

4. At the moment, without knowing what City Light's role might have been in getting the solar subsidy approved to begin with, I don't blame them for it. But it does exist. My criticism is of the subsidy itself. I think it should end, because it's much less effective on the climate front than it would be if the same money (along with those streetcars, which are a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons) were redirected.

Noicons dear, you can assert whatever you want, but I did the math. The Georgia Power program is a good program - they're much more engaged than City Light - but it's nowhere near one cent per kwh. The only way you could even get near that is if you have a separate service exclusively for your charging station, and do exclusively off-peak charging.

If you want an off-peak rate for charging, make your opinion known, don't just gripe on Slog. City Light reports to the council, and it's the council that made them sell off their share of Centralia, get out of WPPS, and create the nation's most generous low income discount program. Mike O'Brien is the Councilmember who oversees City Light. Also, you should bring it up with the folks at the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association. They're a great, very engaged group.

I can see that I've run into a snotty city employee, one of the many. Bye, then.

Oh come on, now Noicons, dear. Don't be unbrainwashed.